After watching for four years while Governor Scott Walker and his Republican colleagues in Wisconsin have dismantled the systems and institutions that protected workers, children, people with disabilities, open government, college students, and the environment, in the fall of 2015 I decided to run for a seat on the Madison Common Council. I was propelled by a sense of urgency about defending the democratic spaces still left open to people who aren’t connected to lobbyists and big money interests.

My fifteen-year experience as a worker-owner at Union Cab Cooperative in Madison, and as an elected leader in the international worker cooperative movement, gave me the confidence to run for public office. Plus, being a member of a democratically owned and operated workplace opened my mind and helped me to realize that there doesn’t have to be a “them” making decisions for “us.” It can be “us” making decisions for ourselves. We get to be the protagonists of our own story if we show up and participate.

My campaign focused on people-centered economic development and the need to develop new ways to take care of each other.

Even though I was running for a nonpartisan office, my volunteer campaign staff advised me to join the Dane County Democratic Party in order to seek their endorsement. I had no prior experience with the party, but I took this advice. The Dane County Dems issued a dual endorsement for both me and my opponent. I also sought and won the endorsements of Progressive Dane and the Four Lakes Green Party.

But more important to me were the endorsements of the people whose work I respected, like current and former state, county, city, and school board representatives and local labor groups. The local labor federation sent out mailings on my behalf, and I had 100 volunteers who braved the cold weather to walk lit drop routes for me.

I won my race by a margin of 11 percent.

During the presidential primary season, some of the bonds of friendship and solidarity I forged with people who supported my campaign, bonds I thought were rooted in shared values, have suffered because of my opposition to Hillary Clinton as the candidate of Walmart, war, and Wall Street.

I’ve also been critical of the undemocratic ways in which the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has fallen in line to support her candidacy, entering into a joint fundraising agreement with her that allows Clinton’s billionaire backers to funnel money to her campaign under the false pretense that state parties will share the funds. FEC filings show what a bogus arrangement that is: The Hillary Victory Fund paid $200,278 to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin on January 4, 2016. That same day the Democratic Party of Wisconsin cut a check to the Democratic National Committee for $200,000.

As I write these words, I feel the pressure of loyalty to a party I don’t even belong to anymore, and a niggling fear about my political future should I decide to run for re-election next year, given how my criticism has rocked the Democratic Party boat. I’m just a nonpartisan elected official in a middle-sized midwestern city. How great must the pressure be on people whose careers, aspirations, and ideals are at stake every time they try to take a principled stand that goes against the Democratic Party line?

Five years after the historic Wisconsin uprising, a growing number of Wisconsinites are realizing that the Democratic Party is an ineffectual tool to combat the regressive forces that have come to dominate state politics since the rise of the Tea Party.

Since 2011, when Walker became governor, living conditions for working people and the poor have been declining. Union busting, voter suppression, deep cuts in public education, gutting and defunding public assistance programs, and slow job growth have all contributed to lower wages, fewer jobs, and tighter household budgets.

As leader of the Democratic Party in 2011, President Obama couldn’t find the comfortable shoes he said he would put on in order to march with working people under attack. Instead, he stood by as Walker dismantled collective bargaining rights for public workers. In the ensuing years, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin ran two failed gubernatorial campaigns, adopted a hands-off approach to critical state supreme court elections, and alienated masses of grassroots activists by rebuffing their efforts to promote more progressive candidates.

Longtime political activists Linda and David Rolnick spent years in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s district doing outreach for the Democratic Party in rural Walworth County. The state party, they say, refused to help.“We turned to making our own signs because they wouldn’t give us any,” Linda recalls. “We would scrounge around for cardboard. We would go up to the county dump and scarf as many wires as we could for our homemade signs. We were garbage picking and scavenging for the Dems.”

David adds, “It was kind of like how employees feel with a bad boss—like we tricked them out of something when we got the teeniest bit of support.”

Greg Gordon, a progressive activist in Waunakee, Wisconsin, says of the recent debates surrounding state superdelegate pledges to Hillary Clinton, “If I have learned anything the past few election cycles, it is that there is a tremendous values gap between the Democratic Party of Wisconsin insiders and the progressive grassroots.” He adds, “That is not going to be closed by appealing to team loyalty, or by fear-mongering or finger-wagging or name-calling.”

Despite losing the April 5 Wisconsin primary election to Bernie Sanders by more than 13 percent, Hillary Clinton’s supporters began calling for Sanders to drop out of the race in the name of party loyalty and the fear of a Republican presidency. But Sanders backers are not drawn to his rallies in the thousands and tens of thousands just because they are looking for the candidate who can beat a Republican in November. They are energized and mobilized behind his campaign because of the simple, common-sense policy ideas that, if enacted, would have a huge impact on the day-to-day life of every single American.

Universal, single-payer health care and fully funded public education through college would immediately provide the most basic level of support that people need to gain control of their lives. And public financing would set the stage for more fair elections. As it is, the influence of lobbyists and corporations has turned our political system into what some Princeton researchers have called an oligarchy, where popular sentiment rarely translates into state policy but is rather disregarded in favor of the needs of the most wealthy.

The Clintons have been key players in the Democrats’ rightward shift, pushing “third way,” centrist policies as they built and controlled party infrastructure over the past thirty years. More recently, the family’s Clinton Foundation has been accepting donations from the world’s wealthiest people, governments, and foundations, many of whom double as generous donors to the Democratic Party and to Hillary Clinton herself. Ken Silverstein calls the foundation a money laundering machine, and its entanglements have dubious policy implications should Hillary become President.

Yet whenever Sanders or his supporters raise questions about Clinton’s disastrous and hawkish record as Secretary of State, her support of free trade agreements, or her close ties to Wall Street, all of which are unpopular with the Democratic Party base, Clinton deflects the critics, typically with some accusation of sexism for having even questioned her on these matters.

But there is a vast difference between the kind of liberal feminism that hails Hillary Clinton as a heroine for attempting to occupy a position of power within one of the most violent governments on the planet, and a more holistic form of feminism that calls for the destruction of the patriarchal systems of power that support it. Those in the latter camp tend to support Sanders.

The Sanders campaign is shining a spotlight on what happens when party building and party loyalty become ends in themselves, unmoored from the values and ideas that supposedly anchor the organization to its support base.

While this dissonance may erupt in chaos for the party come July, it has always had simmering, low-level consequences for elected Democrats who consider themselves to be progressive.

Many of these Democrats are deeply embedded in the party’s fundraising relationships and networks. They depend on those networks to get elected. Sometimes they run on explicitly progressive platforms, but when it comes time to act on those policy ideas once in office, they find their agenda gets stonewalled or ignored by party leadership, who control access to donor networks and voter files come campaign season. Candidates are told not to raise controversial issues, especially if they’re not vying for a safe, gerrymandered seat.

Here is one example: Despite 2010 referendum results in which 75 percent of Dane County voters registered their approval for the legalization of marijuana, advocate Gary Storck says he still found it difficult to get Democrats to sign on to a medical marijuana bill. He cites some legislators’ fear that they would lose support from their leadership as one reason they balked at supporting an apparently popular initiative.

Progressives working with the Democratic Party learn to be team players if they want to get anything done and if they hope to be re-elected.

Until a critical mass of progressives refuse to participate in the Democratic Party fundraising machines and build their own organizations rooted in widely shared values, progressives won’t be any real force in electoral politics as progressives. They might become influential as individuals within the party, but not as a collective force to push and win a progressive agenda. Worse, by calling themselves progressives within the party, they allow themselves to be used as a smokescreen for the corporate Democratic Party.

We don’t have to play this zero-sum game between lesser and greater evils. We’ve created the system we live in, and we can change it, if we have the collective will to do so. That’s what members of independent political parties like the Socialist Party USA, Socialist Alternative, and the Green Party believe, and they’ve been doing the organizing work to back that up.

Both the Green Party and Socialist Alternative plan to set up camp outside the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia at the end of July. In March, Socialist Alternative called on Sanders to begin planning his jailbreak from the Democratic Party, and urged him to consider running on a Green Party ticket with Jill Stein after the Democratic National Convention.

“There’s an urgent need for us to discuss how we’re going to initiate the new political party for the 99 percent,” says Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative member of the Seattle City Council who ran on and achieved the passage of a $15 minimum wage in her city.

Progressives, says Sawant, are making plans to run candidates on a pro-worker, anti-corporate platform all across the country: “Everything we’ve seen in Seattle, and in the response that Bernie has received, is a phenomenal indicator of how we’re moving into a new period of struggle and resistance.”

A week after I was elected last spring, a teacher at my neighborhood elementary school invited me into her third-grade classroom to talk to the kids about local government. This is a school that serves several subsidized housing communities and where 80 percent of the kids get free or reduced price lunch. Among the questions they had for me: “Why did the police kill [local black teenager] Tony Robinson?”; “Why are there people living on the streets in Madison?”; “How can you keep us safe?”; “Why are there dead fish in the lagoon?”

At the end of the hour, I told the class that the questions they were raising were exactly the ones the city needs to address. We decided to work together the following school year to develop a resolution on a topic of their choosing. Every Thursday afternoon I’ve been meeting with a group of Mendota Elementary School fourth- and fifth-graders to brainstorm, research, debate, and choose a topic. They settled on homelessness, and have plans to organize a food and clothing bank in their school. They’ve participated in community meetings with homelessness service providers and are developing a public awareness campaign that includes song-and-dance numbers they’ve composed and choreographed. Now they are drafting a resolution to be presented to the Common Council.

Fourth- and fifth-graders at Mendota Elementary School work on their public-awareness campaign on homelessness. They are now drafting a resolution for the city.

Whatever other accomplishments I may achieve as an elected official, nurturing the capacity of kids to participate in democratic decision-making and helping them exercise their collective creativity and power will be the most meaningful.

No matter how the 2016 presidential election turns out, we will still need to collectively grapple with the question of how we will care for each other in the face of collapsing natural, financial, and social systems, including the two-party oligarchical system of government at the national and state levels. The most precious resources we can bring to that struggle are our integrity, our creativity, and our relationships with each other. Let’s build these resources with solidarity, as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

Comments (6)

True Democracy! IMHO I feel

True Democracy! IMHO I feel that everyone who identifies with the progressive movement should become more familiar with the Community and Environmental Legal Defense Fund. They are doing some awesome work around the country to enable counties and municipalities to start the process of initiating and passing state constitutional amendments that effectively sever the stranglehold that the states and federal government have been using through administrative rules and legislation to deny community autonomy. True democracy must happen first at the local level where personal social interactions occur. Centralization of power always leads to corruption. If you are interested in learning more go to http://celdf.org/.

Peace

Scottmore than 2 years ago

The world needs more people

The world needs more people like this. Never give up on your principles and beliefs. There is always a way to make an impact. One of those kids would probably make a better president than Hillary, or Trump. Then again, not a high bar to reach.

Readermore than 2 years ago

So proud of you, Rebecca…

So proud of you, Rebecca… And such a well written article

Ted Voth Jrmore than 2 years ago

Great article, Rebecca.

Great article, Rebecca. You understand the meaning of and the need for solidarity better than most folks do. Now what steps can we take together to promote and broaden it?

Martina Ripponmore than 2 years ago

I never thought I would be so

I never thought I would be so disgusted by the actions of the party I've been a member of my entire life. But then again, I never thought I would see the democratic party become what it is today.
The DPW is useless.
Have they even come up with a candidate to run against Walker less than 18 months from now?
How much support are they offering to the grassroots candidates running against many of the republican incumbents?
I haven't seen anything in the way of a press release or an interview about any of this. I will donate to the individual candidates campaigns, but I can no longer in good conscience donate to the DPW or the DNC. They have become nothing more than fortresses for the establishment candidates and incumbents.

jchuckjohnsmore than 2 years ago

As a progressive ex democrat,

As a progressive ex democrat, I can only agree with the realities expressed above.The state party and the DNC have taken part in a shameful (if not criminal) effort to fix a presidential primary. They have marginalized their base and pushed third way neoliberal candidates sure to lose to Walker. Wi progressives are politically homeless, but are becoming aware of the need to build ourselves a new home outside the right center pro oligarchy party. Down ticket representatives have, in endorsing a candidate their constituents voted against, exposed themselves as representing their personal ambitions over the folks who put them in office.

Rob Gansonmore than 2 years ago

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